Who is Jim Norton? - Elementary School

Elementary School

What is Physiology?
Questions
Physiologists Ask
Explore Physiology
Meet a Physiologist
Careers Brochure
Minority Resources
Educators & Outreach
Related Links

Who is James Norton?
Teacher and Dinosaur Researcher

James M. Norton was born in Bangor, Maine. He is the second of five children. His family moved to South Portland, ME, while he was still a baby, and he has lived there ever since, except for when he was away at school.

Jim has always liked living things and spent many hours as a child exploring the woods, streams, and ponds near his home. Over the years he adopted a lot of animals as pets – birds with broken wings, baby squirrels that fell out of the nest, frogs, turtles, and even snakes. A hobby of his as a child was drawing animals, and many of his early drawings of birds hang in his office today. Jim also made a lot of carvings and woodcuts of birds, deer, and whales.

Figuring Out What to Be
Even though Jim knew he wanted to become a doctor or scientist and would need to take a lot of science classes, he also liked to study languages. He was able to do both by going to a college (the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA) where he could study languages but also take the classes he needed to be able to apply to medical school. He has never been sorry for doing that as it gave him a broad education and not just a science-based education. After he graduated from Holy Cross in 1967, Jim had a variety of interesting experiences before ending up at Dartmouth College to study physiology. He got his Ph.D. degree in Physiology in 1979.

Finding a Job
After he finished, Dr. Norton went back to Maine to get more training in research at the Maine Medical Center in Portland. There he also studied the heart and its blood vessels. It was while he was working there that he first learned about the University of New England’s College of Osteopathic Medicine (UNECOM), which had been started in 1978 in nearby Biddeford, ME. He visited the campus, met with the teachers and students, and liked it right away. So he applied for a job there, even though he didn’t really know if he had the skills or ability to take on all the teaching he would have to be doing. He got a job there and started in August of 1980.

At UNECOM, Dr. Norton is now a Professor and even was Chair of the department from 1986-2002. He does a lot of teaching, serves on committees and does other things for the school, and still does research. The people in his department do all the teaching of physiology to medical students training to be family doctors or medical specialists. They also teach students who want to be physician assistants and nurse anesthetists (who help during surgery to put people to sleep).

Dr. Norton teaches classes about both the heart and its blood vessels and about the lungs and the illnesses people get. He helps plan what classes will be taught and how to keep teachers up-to-date on what they teach and how they teach. He tries to show other teachers that they should be teaching students things they can’t get from reading textbooks.

Studying Dinosaurs
Dr. Norton has two different research projects. One is working on how to help make teachers better at their job. The other is a little different – he is trying to figure out how the lungs and airways worked in a group of dinosaurs called theropods (think Velociraptor from Jurassic Park!). This combines a childhood interest of his (what kid isn’t interested in dinosaurs!) with comparative physiology (how different kinds of animals have different ways of dealing with things like moving blood around the body and handling food), with respiratory physiology (how they breathe), and with computer modeling.

Dr. Norton has given several talks at national dinosaur meetings and is writing papers about what he’s doing that he’s hoping to get printed in science magazines.

To do this type of research means Dr. Norton needs to visit museums, take pictures and measure dinosaur ribs and backbones, and then create a working model on the computer of the dinosaur backbone and rib cage. He hopes this work will help to answer the question of whether these animals were really warm blooded like us (not cold blooded like lizards and snakes) and acted a lot like the animal hunters of today, such as wolves or lions.

Outside of Work
When he’s not teaching or doing research, Dr. Norton loves to read, go to movies, enjoy the Maine coast, watch one son play in his band and the other son pitch for his college, and make ship models. His current project is a 1/24-scale model of the launch of the H.M.S. Bounty, complete with figures of Lt. Bligh and the 18 other loyal crew members who were set adrift with him, built entirely from “scratch.” Another model he’s made recently is a model of an Irish ocean-going curragh (a leather-covered boat), which he had first built for his late father but which now sits in his office. His next project will be a model of the “James Caird,” the small boat used by Ernest Shackleton and five others to cross 800 miles of dangerous South Atlantic seas to reach South Georgia Island, which will again have little crewmembers on it.

Dr. Norton has also helped out his local American Heart Association chapter with different activities. While his sons were going to school, he was always busy with parent-teacher groups, building committees, and sports booster clubs.

He also helps out with the Dinosaur Discovery Center that was started by his brother who also likes dinosaurs. Both of them go to elementary classes and take casts of dinosaur bones, teeth, skulls, and eggs to teach the students about dinosaur biology, physiology, evolution, and ecology. They are hoping to come up with materials on dinosaurs that teachers around the state can use in their classes.